Quotes about Opportunity

If you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams.

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of race.

Every persecuted individual and race should get much consolation out of the great human law, which is universal and eternal, that merit, no matter under what skin found, is, in the long run, recognized and rewarded.

Cast down your bucket where you are.

In the earlier days of freedom almost every coloured man who learned to read would receive "a call to preach" within a few days after he began reading.

that this was the first time in the entire history of the Negro that a member of my race had been asked to speak from the same platform with white Southern men and women on any important National occasion. I was asked now to speak to an audience composed of the wealth and culture of the white South, the representatives of my former masters.

After having been for a while at Hampton, I found myself in difficulty because I did not have books and clothing. Usually, however, I got around the trouble about books by borrowing from those who were more fortunate than myself.

The effect of this movement, or revolution, as I have called it, is not to "tear down and level up" in order to bring about an artificial equality, but to give every individual a chance "to make good," to determine for himself his place and position in the community by the character and quality of the service he is able to perform.

when one door of happiness closes another opens but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one the one which has opened for us.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens: but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened before us.

Until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse.